Satire nose no bounds: Mattis didn’t avert nuclear war by grabbing Trump’s nostrils, journo confirms In a comical reflection of the current US political climate, a sports journalist has been forced to admit that James Mattis did not, in fact, grab US President Donald Trump’s nose during a heated exchange over nuking North Korea.

Grant Brisbee, a senior baseball writer for SB Nation, tweeted what he (jokingly) claimed was an excerpt for Bob Woodward’s explosive new book, ‘Fear: Trump in the White House,’ real excerpts of which were published by the Tuesday.

“Man, this new Bob Woodward book is going to be *wild,*” Brisbee tweeted above a tongue-in-cheek excerpt in which nuclear war between the US and North Korea was apparently averted when US Secretary of Defense James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis grabbed Trump’s nose.

What should have been painfully obvious satire quickly descended into chaos on Brisbee’s Twitter feed. Even a number of anti-Trumpers were duped, if only briefly.

Things took an even more bizarre twist when sardonic comments below Brisbee‘s tweet were misinterpreted.

While, in this instance at least, fiction remains stranger than fact, it seems the two are beginning to become blurred under the current White House administration. Among the actual claims made in Woodward’s new book are: that Trump ordered Mattis to “f**king kill” Assad; that Mattis compared Trump to a ‘fifth or sixth grader’; and that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly described the president as an ‘unhinged idiot.’

Naturally, it wasn’t long before Trump himself took to Twitter to claim the quotes were made up and that the timing of the book’s release ahead of the November midterm elections was conspicuous.